Elting E. Morison

Elting Elmore Morison (December 14, 1909 – April 20, 1995)^[1] was an author of non-fiction books, an essayist, a United States historian of technology, a military biographer, an MIT professor emeritus, the conceiver and founder of MIT's program in Science, Technology and Society (STS).^[2]

Biography

Elting Elmore Morison was born in Milwaukee on December 14, 1909. He studied at Harvard University and received the BA degree in 1932 and the MA in 1937. From 1935 to 1937 Morison was assistant dean at Harvard. During World War II he served in the Naval Reserve.

In 1948 he became director of the Theodore Roosevelt Research Project which resulted in the publishing of an eight-volume series, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (including the Theodore Roosevelt's autobiography), of which he was editor from 1951 to 1954.

After World War II, he first came to MIT in 1946 as an assistant professor of English in the Department of Humanities. Later, in his tenure as a professor of industrial history at the Sloan School of Management, Morison directed a program (similar to his late creation at MIT that would be known as Program in Science, Technology and Society) designed to reveal the sweep of technological change as reported in the history of science, technology and industrial development, with an accent on American history of technology.

Later on, in 1966 he joined Yale University as master of Timothy Dwight College and as a professor of history and American studies. In 1972, once again he rejoined MIT as the holder of the Killian Chair.

In the 1970s he played a major role in conceiving and planning what has become the interdisciplinary STS program (known as Program in Science, Technology and Society) through which MIT faculty and students focus on the ways in which scientific, technological and social factors interact.

He died in 1995 in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Professional organizations and affiliations

• Member of the following committee and sub-committee:
  • Secretary of the Navy's Advisory Subcommittee on Naval History
  • NASA Historical Advisory Committee

Works

Author and/or co-author

• 1958 - Elting E. Morison - The American Style,
• 1968 - Elting E. Morison - Men, Machines, and Modern Times, ^[3]
• 1974 - Elting E. Morison - Fron Know-How to Nowhere: The Development of American Technology, ^[4]
• 1976 - Elizabeth Forbes Morison and Elting E. Morison - New Hampshire: A Bicentennial History. In Questia

Biographer

• 1942 - Elting E. Morison - Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy,
• 1960 - Elting E. Morison - Turmoil and Tradition, a biography of Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State in the Hoover Administration and later Secretary of War in the Roosevelt Administration, Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians.

Essays in volumes

• 1961 - Elting E. Morison - A Case Study of Innovation (pages 592-605) in the collective volume The Planning of Change - Reading in the Applied Behavioral Sciences, edited by Warren G. Bennis (from Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kenneth D. Benne and Robert Chin (both from Boston University), and published by Holt, Rinehart and Wiston, New York, 1961, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61-14602 20893-0111

See also

• List of Yale University people

References

External links

• Personal data of Elting E. Morison on Ancestry.com
• Men, Machines, and Modern Times by Elting E. Morison on Amazon.com